“We just don’t think you’d work on TV.”
November 4, 2016 12:26 PM Subscribe
Joan Rivers’s Remarkable Rise to (and Devastating Fall from) Comedy’s Highest Ranks: "In the new biography Last Girl Before Freeway, writer Leslie Bennetts explores the peerless career of comedian Joan Rivers. Here, Bennetts revisits Rivers’s darkest hour, along with her shining moments in the high-flying 1960s and 1970s." (SL Vanity Fair)
You know that Shakespeare was, like, 20 or 30 years before Rivers and Rickles, right?
posted by Etrigan at 12:53 PM on November 4, 2016 [12 favorites]
posted by Etrigan at 12:53 PM on November 4, 2016 [12 favorites]
You're actually, literally comparing Joan Rivers to Shakespeare?
posted by Kirth Gerson at 1:01 PM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Kirth Gerson at 1:01 PM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]
I'm a huge fan of Rivers, and I'm really excited to read this book. And so glad that she ended her career back on top (or near enough to it). Carson's people told her she would never replace him. That she would never even be considered for it. She literally had to take the career path she did if she wanted to rise - and possibly if she wanted to stay where she was (since there was no guarantee she would continue to regularly guest host under a new host). And it wrecked her.
I highly recommend the documentary about her, A Piece of Work
posted by Mchelly at 1:11 PM on November 4, 2016 [7 favorites]
I highly recommend the documentary about her, A Piece of Work
posted by Mchelly at 1:11 PM on November 4, 2016 [7 favorites]
And then her Yorkshire terrier, Spike, jumped onto her lap and sat on the gun. Rivers knew her way around firearms; she often packed a pistol, and she felt no hesitation about using it. Maybe that was the answer now.
But suddenly a terrible thought occurred to her: if she killed herself, what would happen to Spike? The diminutive Yorkie was very cute, but he was also mean and cantankerous. He didn’t like anybody but his mistress, and he was ridiculously spoiled; his favorite food was a rare roast beef sandwich, no mayo or mustard. Her daughter referred to him as “a tall rat.”
If you had asked me to imagine Joan Rivers' dog, this is exactly what I would have come up with.
posted by thelonius at 1:25 PM on November 4, 2016 [15 favorites]
But suddenly a terrible thought occurred to her: if she killed herself, what would happen to Spike? The diminutive Yorkie was very cute, but he was also mean and cantankerous. He didn’t like anybody but his mistress, and he was ridiculously spoiled; his favorite food was a rare roast beef sandwich, no mayo or mustard. Her daughter referred to him as “a tall rat.”
If you had asked me to imagine Joan Rivers' dog, this is exactly what I would have come up with.
posted by thelonius at 1:25 PM on November 4, 2016 [15 favorites]
I blame her and Don Rickles for ruining comedy
You blame... Don... Rickles...?
posted by My Dad at 1:27 PM on November 4, 2016 [12 favorites]
You blame... Don... Rickles...?
posted by My Dad at 1:27 PM on November 4, 2016 [12 favorites]
Like, where does Milton Berle fit in on the "insult comedy ruined comedy" continuum?
posted by My Dad at 1:29 PM on November 4, 2016
posted by My Dad at 1:29 PM on November 4, 2016
Mean people suck, and Joan "Obama's gay and his wife is transgender" Rivers was definitely a mean person.
posted by Lyme Drop at 1:33 PM on November 4, 2016 [11 favorites]
posted by Lyme Drop at 1:33 PM on November 4, 2016 [11 favorites]
You're actually, literally comparing Joan Rivers to Shakespeare?
Yes, I am. Because they both actually, literally used insults in comedy, which is a thing that happened pretty frequently before 1950.
posted by Etrigan at 1:34 PM on November 4, 2016 [14 favorites]
Yes, I am. Because they both actually, literally used insults in comedy, which is a thing that happened pretty frequently before 1950.
posted by Etrigan at 1:34 PM on November 4, 2016 [14 favorites]
Joan Rivers is . . . complicated. My kneejerk reaction to her has always been "god, she's awful" but then you put her into context and you have to wonder how much of the "god she's awful' reaction is honest and how much is entrenched social misogyny and disgust for her pushing against some pretty repressive idea about women in entertainment, much less comedy, in the 60s and 70s.
posted by crush-onastick at 1:57 PM on November 4, 2016 [30 favorites]
posted by crush-onastick at 1:57 PM on November 4, 2016 [30 favorites]
You're actually, literally comparing Joan Rivers to Shakespeare?
I wonder when the analogy died as a concept in English.
posted by Palindromedary at 2:02 PM on November 4, 2016 [16 favorites]
I wonder when the analogy died as a concept in English.
posted by Palindromedary at 2:02 PM on November 4, 2016 [16 favorites]
/me looks at watch
posted by I-baLL at 2:19 PM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by I-baLL at 2:19 PM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]
maybe we should take the Shakespeare thing to MetaTawwk
posted by thelonius at 2:58 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by thelonius at 2:58 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
But now in these more enlightened times, we've outsourced our Insult Comedy to puppet dogs.
Still, it was the 'edge' (or 'obnoxiousnessness') that probably made Joan Rivers' level of success possible because in those days, you had to be a "Nasty Woman" (or "bitch") to even play in the Comedy Big Leagues.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:16 PM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]
Still, it was the 'edge' (or 'obnoxiousnessness') that probably made Joan Rivers' level of success possible because in those days, you had to be a "Nasty Woman" (or "bitch") to even play in the Comedy Big Leagues.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:16 PM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]
Everyone who says Rivers was "too mean" has to look at her early material. Every joke was at her own expense, much like Phyllis Diller, and she was much more warm. After her husband killed himself, at a time when Rivers most likely could have and should have retired (not due to anything other than being at the right age to go out on top), she had literally negative tens of millions of dollars in the bank, and the culture had changed so much that being self-effacing would get her nowhere. So she clawed her way back up the ranks, taking on celebrity culture from the standpoint of someone who had had to claw her own way up not once, not twice, but every single time she turned around.
Rivers may have been complicated, but she's a fucking trailblazer and a hero, and if she was mean, she earned the right to be mean.
posted by xingcat at 3:23 PM on November 4, 2016 [36 favorites]
Rivers may have been complicated, but she's a fucking trailblazer and a hero, and if she was mean, she earned the right to be mean.
posted by xingcat at 3:23 PM on November 4, 2016 [36 favorites]
Mean people suck, and Joan "Obama's gay and his wife is transgender" Rivers was definitely a mean person.
The best part is that Rivers agreed with you. Newsweek called Obama "The First Gay President," so I hope they're grouped in this lump, too, unless one acknowledges that there is nuance and subtley in apparently crass humor. So let's split the deck on this one, because I think POTUS was a fan.
Even abortion wasn’t off limits. “She said, ‘I knew I wasn’t wanted when I was born with a coat hanger in my mouth,’” recalled one Hollywood director. “People didn’t talk about things like that back then; illegal abortion was verboten, and at the time it ruined people’s lives. She broke ground because she dared to say things that other people dared to think were funny—and she got away with it.”
She surprised folks with a little monologue in a gay club in LA in the early 2000s. She riffed on abortion and how the people who used to get mad at her for those jokes were now the ones who were ok with them. She talked about the speed of that shift, how she felt audiences changing in their willingness to laugh at crassness as political discourse ran its natural course. It wasn't a complaint, it was an observation: times change, people, but my sense of humor's kinda set and I expect people to drift in and out of liking what I say. That came up a lot in her In Bed With Joan series, especially when talking to other insult comics like Bianca Del Rio.
I loved it. It's one of the few things I think back on fondly of my time in LA.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 4:23 PM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]
The best part is that Rivers agreed with you. Newsweek called Obama "The First Gay President," so I hope they're grouped in this lump, too, unless one acknowledges that there is nuance and subtley in apparently crass humor. So let's split the deck on this one, because I think POTUS was a fan.
Even abortion wasn’t off limits. “She said, ‘I knew I wasn’t wanted when I was born with a coat hanger in my mouth,’” recalled one Hollywood director. “People didn’t talk about things like that back then; illegal abortion was verboten, and at the time it ruined people’s lives. She broke ground because she dared to say things that other people dared to think were funny—and she got away with it.”
She surprised folks with a little monologue in a gay club in LA in the early 2000s. She riffed on abortion and how the people who used to get mad at her for those jokes were now the ones who were ok with them. She talked about the speed of that shift, how she felt audiences changing in their willingness to laugh at crassness as political discourse ran its natural course. It wasn't a complaint, it was an observation: times change, people, but my sense of humor's kinda set and I expect people to drift in and out of liking what I say. That came up a lot in her In Bed With Joan series, especially when talking to other insult comics like Bianca Del Rio.
I loved it. It's one of the few things I think back on fondly of my time in LA.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 4:23 PM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]
Insult comedy was a thing long before Don Rickles. He just developed a specific version of it that was suitable for TV audiences and the tastes of 1950s/60s America.
And it is just an act - by all reports, he's actually a very nice man. Rickles and his wife have been friends with mild-mannered-nice-guy Bob Newhart and his wife for something like 60 years, if that tells you anything.
I was not a big fan of Joan Rivers' comedy, but I could respect her drive, work ethic, and resilience. It must have been tough for her starting out as one of only a handful of women doing standup, and the times were different in so many ways then that she gets some retrospective slack from me.
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 5:24 PM on November 4, 2016 [8 favorites]
And it is just an act - by all reports, he's actually a very nice man. Rickles and his wife have been friends with mild-mannered-nice-guy Bob Newhart and his wife for something like 60 years, if that tells you anything.
I was not a big fan of Joan Rivers' comedy, but I could respect her drive, work ethic, and resilience. It must have been tough for her starting out as one of only a handful of women doing standup, and the times were different in so many ways then that she gets some retrospective slack from me.
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 5:24 PM on November 4, 2016 [8 favorites]
if she was mean, she earned the right to be mean.
There's no such thing as the right to be mean. Too many people think there is, and that they've earned it. They're wrong on both counts.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:34 PM on November 4, 2016 [17 favorites]
There's no such thing as the right to be mean. Too many people think there is, and that they've earned it. They're wrong on both counts.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:34 PM on November 4, 2016 [17 favorites]
There's no such thing as the right to be mean. Too many people think there is, and that they've earned it. They're wrong on both counts.
Next up on Netflix:Mean Girls
posted by zippy at 7:39 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
Next up on Netflix:
posted by zippy at 7:39 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
What if the problem is that Joan Rivers joined the Fashion establishment? What if a comedian telling jokes to a crowd who's ok with being made fun of is totally different from being the muscle behind an implicit lie told to all women: that they are ugly unless they are literally perfectly attired and made up and perfectly fit according to an impossible scale of fitness?
What if we acknowledge that comedy has a lot of ugly sides at times but that the relentless drive to destroy women who appear in public on red carpets is the real fucking problem (among many) that anyone who works in fashion should be forced to confront?
I'm tired of this idea that being sarcastic or even mean is mankind's true problem when literally everything in modern western media is subtly ruining the self esteem of every woman on earth because that's how fashion makes money.
Joan Rivers's most famous joke before she became the fashion police was at Ed Sullivan's expense and he was in on it. What she did on the red carpet was like an atom bomb compared to that joke's pillow fight.
posted by shmegegge at 9:00 PM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]
What if we acknowledge that comedy has a lot of ugly sides at times but that the relentless drive to destroy women who appear in public on red carpets is the real fucking problem (among many) that anyone who works in fashion should be forced to confront?
I'm tired of this idea that being sarcastic or even mean is mankind's true problem when literally everything in modern western media is subtly ruining the self esteem of every woman on earth because that's how fashion makes money.
Joan Rivers's most famous joke before she became the fashion police was at Ed Sullivan's expense and he was in on it. What she did on the red carpet was like an atom bomb compared to that joke's pillow fight.
posted by shmegegge at 9:00 PM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]
If the Comedians in Cars episode with Rickles is accurate, he loves getting ribbed the same way he dishes it out. Seinfeld gets Rickles' comedy and can dish it back expertly, and it just tickles the guy.
Let me point out that pretty much every insult comic mentioned here is Jewish: Rickles, Rivers, Berle, Seinfeld. Almost all the "sick" comics were Jews too: Bruce, Friedman, Sahl, Berman, Nichols and May.
Even the contemporary iteration of this, the insult comic dog, is Jewish: Smigel.
I don't think this is accidental. Firstly, there is this sort of comedy in Judaism, produced by the crucible of history, that is bleak and neurotic and despairing and absurd. I think it is also a product of the Jewish experience on America of the 20th century, of perpetually being outsiders, of our status being provisional -- we're American until the is useful to suspect of us un-Americanism (it's no surprise that so many of the named names during HUAC were Jews), we're white until it is no longer useful for us to be white, as is demonstrated now by the rise of a new American racism that definitely excludes Jews from whiteness. Our privilege is somehow also a burden, always suspect, because it is seen as unearned, as with JAP jokes, where behavior that is unremarkable or even laudatory in gentile women (concern for financial security; sexual agency; strong cultural identity) is seen as perverse and ridiculous when demonstrated by a Jewish woman, because her privilege, again, is unearned, the privilege of a pretender or interloper.)
This produces hostile, neurotic comedy. Because of the nature of comedy, which is. By its nature, a place of inversion, Jews could express that angst and hostility.
Is it mean? I suppose it seems mean. But this is not the comedy of people punching down, not at its root. It's the comedy of people punching up, at a society that barely accepts and tolerates them. Jews carved out a space where they could scream back at the people who despised them, and it's the mark of real
Power and real privilege that the people they screamed at loved it.
posted by maxsparber at 9:06 PM on November 4, 2016 [30 favorites]
Let me point out that pretty much every insult comic mentioned here is Jewish: Rickles, Rivers, Berle, Seinfeld. Almost all the "sick" comics were Jews too: Bruce, Friedman, Sahl, Berman, Nichols and May.
Even the contemporary iteration of this, the insult comic dog, is Jewish: Smigel.
I don't think this is accidental. Firstly, there is this sort of comedy in Judaism, produced by the crucible of history, that is bleak and neurotic and despairing and absurd. I think it is also a product of the Jewish experience on America of the 20th century, of perpetually being outsiders, of our status being provisional -- we're American until the is useful to suspect of us un-Americanism (it's no surprise that so many of the named names during HUAC were Jews), we're white until it is no longer useful for us to be white, as is demonstrated now by the rise of a new American racism that definitely excludes Jews from whiteness. Our privilege is somehow also a burden, always suspect, because it is seen as unearned, as with JAP jokes, where behavior that is unremarkable or even laudatory in gentile women (concern for financial security; sexual agency; strong cultural identity) is seen as perverse and ridiculous when demonstrated by a Jewish woman, because her privilege, again, is unearned, the privilege of a pretender or interloper.)
This produces hostile, neurotic comedy. Because of the nature of comedy, which is. By its nature, a place of inversion, Jews could express that angst and hostility.
Is it mean? I suppose it seems mean. But this is not the comedy of people punching down, not at its root. It's the comedy of people punching up, at a society that barely accepts and tolerates them. Jews carved out a space where they could scream back at the people who despised them, and it's the mark of real
Power and real privilege that the people they screamed at loved it.
posted by maxsparber at 9:06 PM on November 4, 2016 [30 favorites]
Palindromedary: "I wonder when the analogy died as a concept in English."
Wednesday, August 23rd, 1978. About 2:30 pm Eastern.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:12 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
Wednesday, August 23rd, 1978. About 2:30 pm Eastern.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:12 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
I just love Don Rickles. I think he's wonderful and I'm so glad he's still alive.
posted by My Dad at 9:12 AM on November 5, 2016
posted by My Dad at 9:12 AM on November 5, 2016
I thought she was an awful human being. If you can't be funny without being cruel, find a different occupation.
posted by Beholder at 9:40 AM on November 5, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Beholder at 9:40 AM on November 5, 2016 [1 favorite]
I know she's a better person than I am, because I probably would have thought, "Oh no, no one will take care of the dog, so I'd better take him with me when I kill myself."
I don't remember hearing about her husband's suicide at all. Of course, news was different back then.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:21 PM on November 5, 2016
I don't remember hearing about her husband's suicide at all. Of course, news was different back then.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:21 PM on November 5, 2016
Considering what the women who work in comedy go through now (and they go through some awful stuff, with an additional layer of shame about being thin skinned, prudish, or unable to "take a joke") I can't even imagine how hard she had to fight to get where she was.
Even if you don't find her funny, that woman was strong as Hell, and I have so, SO much respect for her.
posted by louche mustachio at 4:51 PM on November 5, 2016 [6 favorites]
Even if you don't find her funny, that woman was strong as Hell, and I have so, SO much respect for her.
posted by louche mustachio at 4:51 PM on November 5, 2016 [6 favorites]
I didn't dislike her (just) because I found her unfunny. I disliked her because she was a fat-shame-y, transphobic, Republican wingnut who punched down and spent decades making her living attacking people for trivial bullshit about their looks. Whatever trails she'd blazed, I think she lived long enough to become part of the problem.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 10:26 PM on November 5, 2016
posted by Ursula Hitler at 10:26 PM on November 5, 2016
I worked for her and she was warm, generous, funny and awe-inspiring.
posted by Ideefixe at 11:46 PM on November 5, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Ideefixe at 11:46 PM on November 5, 2016 [4 favorites]
If you can't be funny without being cruel, find a different occupation.
If you don't like it, change the channel.
posted by Dark Messiah at 6:19 AM on November 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
If you don't like it, change the channel.
posted by Dark Messiah at 6:19 AM on November 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
We did that, but here we are, being reminded. Those who liked her are of course free to express their feelings, as are those who did not.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 9:16 AM on November 6, 2016
posted by Kirth Gerson at 9:16 AM on November 6, 2016
If you understand and appreciate the punchline of "the Aristocrats" you'll understand and appreciate Joan Rivers. If you don't I guess there's always Jacobin magazine.
posted by My Dad at 9:21 AM on November 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by My Dad at 9:21 AM on November 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
Or maybe there's always different comedians?
posted by LindsayIrene at 10:05 AM on November 6, 2016
posted by LindsayIrene at 10:05 AM on November 6, 2016
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Not a fan.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 12:48 PM on November 4, 2016 [11 favorites]